Table of Contents 3 – Daniel Pink on Motivating Top Performance 12 – Adam Grant on Why Helping Others Drives Our Success 23 – Tom Rath on Best Practices for Eating, Moving, and Sleeping 36 – Greg McKeown on Determining What is Essential and Eliminating Everything Else 49 – Shawn Achor on Staying Positive in a Stressful Workplace 59 – Richard Wiseman on How to Change Your Life in 59 Seconds 68 – Susan Cain: An Introvert’s Guide to Peak Performance 75 – Christine Carter on How to Be Happier at Work 86 – Warren Berger on Asking Smarter Questions 96 – Gretchen Rubin on Changing Your Habits 109 – Michelle Segar on How to Get More Exercise Without Going to the Gym 117 – Laura Vanderkam on What the World’s Most Successful People Do Differently 126 – David Allen on Getting the Right Things Done 136 – David Burkus on How to Elevate Your Creativity 145 – Dorie Clark on How to Network Like a Thought Leader 157 – Marshall Goldsmith on How to Lead Like a CEO 165 – Susan Peirce Thompson on Eating to Achieve Top Mental Performance 176 – Tracy Brower on How to Create Abundance in Your Work and Life 184 – Todd Henry on How to Be Brilliant at a Moment’s Notice 194 – David Rock on How to Listen Like a Leader 201 – Scott Barry Kaufman on What Creative Geniuses Do Differently 210 – Brigid Schulte on Balancing Work, Life and Play 221 – Michelle Gielan on Inspiring Positivity in Others 233 – Peter Bregman on Improving Your Performance in 18 Minutes a Day 244 – Rory Vaden on How to Multiply Your Time 255 – Dan Ariely: A Behavioral Economist’s Guide to Productivity 265 – Michael Hyatt on How to Have Your Best Year Ever 275 – Hal Elrod on How to Wake Up with More Energy on Less Sleep 284 – Carrie Wilkerson on How to Start a Business While Working for Someone Else 292 – Chandler Bolt on How Self-Publishing a Book Can Transform Your Career 304 – John Lee Dumas on How to Grow Your Network Through Podcasting 312 – Laura Stack on What To Do When There’s Too Much To Do 320 – About the Host: Ron Friedman, Ph.D. THE PEAK WORK PERFORMANCE SUMMIT 2 Daniel Pink Motivating Top Performance Daniel H. Pink is the author of five provocative books, including three long-running New York Times bestsellers: A Whole New Mind, Drive, and To Sell Is Human. Dan’s books have been translated into thirty-five languages and have sold more than two million copies worldwide. He lives in Washington, DC, with his wife and their three children. Ron Friedman, Ph.D.: Dan Pink, thank you so much for joining us at the Summit. It’s a real pleasure to have you here. Dan Pink: It’s great to be here. Ron Friedman, Ph.D.: As many of our viewers know, you wrote Drive, which has become the book on human motivation for a popular audience. In it, you identify three factors that motivate top performance. What are they? Dan Pink: At work, the key is to move away from these controlling contingent motivators. I like to call them “if, then” rewards — as in, “If you do this, then you get that” — because science shows pretty clearly that they are good for simple and short-term tasks, but not so good for complex and long-term tasks. For complex and long-term tasks, you absolutely want to be able to pay people well, but once you do that, you want to offer them autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Autonomy is a sense of self-direction. Mastery is a chance to make progress, to get better at something that matters. Purpose is the knowledge of why you are doing something as well as how to do it. Ron Friedman, Ph.D.: Let’s talk about ways that people watching this can apply these principles to the way they work. Let’s focus on autonomy first. At many companies, work- ers have limited flexibility in how they do their job. That’s especially true early in a career, when you’re hired in a lower level position. What can you do to maximize your autonomy when you’re working in a role that doesn’t offer a lot of choice? Dan Pink: This is from the perspective of the person working? Ron Friedman, Ph.D.: Correct. THE PEAK WORK PERFORMANCE SUMMIT 3 Dan Pink: There is some great guidance here from a researcher at Yale School of Manage- ment named Amy Wrzesniewski, who has written a lot about what she calls “job crafting.” She has found that high performers — from janitors in hospitals to people at higher levels of organizations — tend to reconfigure and re-craft their job in a small way that makes it more fully their own. Her lovely example with a janitor comes from janitors in a hospital who would talk to patients to check in on how they were doing and find ways to help the nurses. This shows that what you can take small steps to try to re-craft the job so that it’s more self-directed and meaningful. Almost every job has that; it’s actually kind of a fascinating notion. We tend to think that there are these job descriptions and people only swim within the lanes of that job descrip- tion; but if you actually look at what happens in organizations, people are crafting and re-crafting what they’re doing. If you go in as a young employee and say, “I need to do what I’m supposed to do, but part of my job is to re-craft what I do and how I do it in a way that’s meaningful to me,” you can get a lot of satisfaction from that. Ron Friedman, Ph.D.: Going beyond the job description that’s been handed to you and looking for proactive ways in which you can shape your role. Dan Pink: Yes, and it doesn’t have to be big things. People have a lot more latitude than they think. The secret of job crafting, according to Wrzesniewski, is not saying, “Oh, even though I’m an account executive, I’m going to start writing lines of code for the software that we’re selling.” But it could be saying, “Even though I am an account executive, I might go talk to the coders and go out to lunch with them because that will give me a better understanding of the product that I’m marketing.” No one is telling you to do that. That’s not in your job description, but it’s meaningful. You self-direct and it makes you a better performer. Ron Friedman, Ph.D.: Now, what if your barrier to autonomy isn’t your role in the compa- ny? What if it’s the personality of the person to whom you report? Do you have any tips for increasing your autonomy when you work for a micromanager? Dan Pink: That’s a very real challenge for a lot of people. There are a couple of things that you can do. Number one is, if you want the autonomy and feel like you need permission from that per- son, ask for it; but ask for it only in terms of that person’s interests. Don’t say, “I really need to feel more autonomous.” That’s not going to work with a lot of those people. Instead say, “Hey boss, I have this great idea for how you can achieve more and accomplish your objec- tives,” and it just so happens that the pathway there is greater autonomy. The other thing is to just do things. In most cases, job crafting is done without any for- mal permission. People just start doing it. There’s nothing to be said; you just start doing something that is meaningful to you. If you’re doing something that is meaningful to you, enhances your performance, and helps out the organization — but your boss tells you to stop, then you might be working in the wrong place. That can be a signal that it’s time to go somewhere else. Ron Friedman, Ph.D.: Let’s turn to mastery. One of the tips that you offer in your book for enhancing your level of competence is to periodically close the door and conduct a perfor- mance review on yourself. Do you conduct performance reviews on yourself and, if so, are THE PEAK WORK PERFORMANCE SUMMIT 4 there some questions that you include that might be helpful for people watching this? Dan Pink: That’s a great question. I do a modified version that I stole from Peter Druck- er. I don’t do it monthly, though I probably should. I do it at around a six-month juncture, but not religiously at six months. It could be at some sort of meaningful break instead. For instance, I did one when the summer came to an end and there was a kind of turning of the page because my kids went back to school - one of them went back to college. I write out just a few paragraphs saying how I want things to go for the next, say, four months and some pitfalls that I need to think about. It’s a mix between Peter Drucker’s advice and what is often called a pre-mortem, as opposed to a post-mortem. Then I file it away in Dropbox and go back to look at it however many months later to see if my expecta- tions were right and what the pitfalls were and whether or not I avoided them.